The Shinning Pool
by Shaded-gloves
Summary: ...named after a Fernando Pessoa poem I dare you to read. It's an unorthodox variation on the ballroom scene, a tease on the edge of a revelation.
1. Within

It is oval, or spherical, the room, although it is endless. Enlighted, wrapped in all the veils from all the distant lands. How strange, the social boundaries of this uncourteous dance: she alone amongst masked felines, all, including her, mercilessly magnetised by the unmasked king, this being that is a secret core for things she cannot name - from which she cannot help but expect, await, a blossoming of light. For now, only the glistening of unnamable eyes and the feeling of a trajectory more sinuous than all the poems she had never read, the dance through the unreadable poem, that does not speak of snakes and does not speak of honey. Closer and closer to the pure softness of the truth it teases, as if she was the one meant to be driven through the dawning gates of Art by a touch. She struggles, in her mind, to find the sinuous shard that started to grow with strange colours – is it in her skin, through the veil of her dress, on the unseen ceiling of the ovoidal room? How is it emanating from the motionless smile, from the sign-like features of his face? She struggles to understand, no longer conscious of her own breath, why in this stance, in this Tyrian purple cloth, in this harshly blossoming figure lies such deep triumph. She marvels at her own knowledge of all this. She can sense the poison in his blood.

She would perhaps remember the sultan of Baghdad who was dipped by his vizir in the water of his bathtub, to live for many years the life of someone else, nurtured by seven women, his wives, in a nameless house, on the shore of a sea. As one final veil leaves them she does not need to wonder to half-know this is a relapse of that sort, a movement out of time. A real oubliette.

She could have dined with him, for once, in that oriental room too rich for the mind. She cannot surmount the stain of contrast his nordic features make, too sharp for the surroundings, languid gold, endless vapours of amber. She muses out-loud, to try and hear her voice in this new medium.

"Where did all this come from?"

"A wandering storyteller offered it to me", comes the answer, equal, ironic.

A spring haze passes through the room.

Several gentle women with dark eyes and a page spread out a canopy, a towel made with something of a spiderweb's wealth. They undress him and he steps inside the bath. His eyes are calmer than any emerald secreted inside a jewel. He is a white flame and fresh from a white fire she will never know. For the second time in one night, she understands the beckoning he never gestured, but she cannot understand. Something like shock passes through her, seeming to bury itself in that ground of endless roots flourishing beneath her feet.

"You can't ask me that", she sais, it seems the obvious.

"Come here, child." he sais. "Don't you know why you are down here? Do I ever speak in vain? Something has to happen to you."

She can't grasp which of the words he has ironically emphasized, but, as with Swann's intonations, it doesn't matter. The pertinence is not lost. She obeys, she gets ready without breathing, she approaches and enters the water like one enters the eye of one's soulstorm.


	2. Passage

The water is metal, heavy like mirrors passed through millions of years. The water is him, emanating straight from his mute gentleness, directly efficient in its morganatic seize. She has the sickening impression her whole skin is going to bloom, but there are no flowers anywhere. Almost cradled by everything latent in his expression, feeling softened at first, as she sinks into that silver, under his limbs of flame now taking hold of her, she gasps for breath and

can hazily perceive her lungs now a sort of somber butterfly billowing the deep water that follows the unknown pulse. And she knows this to go further, the subterranean impulse speaks through her. The ground drinks them as if the kingly water is a rose with vertiginously downward roots.

Briefly, she has the impression of an acid sea of foam dragging her and he moves almost in human manner and provides his idea of a reassuring. "Don't worry, you'll get your rebirth from this."

Fluttered along like a scarf of sensitive breathing life, she shockingly comes to terms with his being of infinite extentions, his body the body of flashes and abysses of stories, one with and open to the terrible depths of the earth, only moving and light, ancient, phosphorescent. She's approaching the origins of the alien glistening in his look upon the world.

There is no room for fear or violence, she has been completely pulled within the essential clamors and echoes

her being, eyelids shut, sees no disharmony in being travelled through the subterranean objects

Surges of light and creation tease each other in a downwards blossoming dance her blood follows devotedly, freely

Now as the word surrounds her she is multiple and her vision encounters the hidden jewels of the world.

She clings to this world of word and body, , to the echoing geography of marmorrean sources, to the grand palace of memory. To all that will be lost in the attempt to retrieve the depths of the shining pool.

Then the masks become double again, the light twisted masks, and violently and gently he draws her out of the water. She knows it would be hard to resist. His hands could make anything evanescent. The dance continues around them, as he nods briefly and lets her go. Through what's been shattered in her blows a musical wind. She had already started to yearn for the moment of her return when the clock stroke 13 and the seen world woke up from its enchanted sleep.


End file.
